The earliest versions of the story of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, the Germanic "tale of Troy," that have come down to us are not from German territory, but from the Scandinavian North, although here, too, the scene of the principal action is on the Rhine and in the land of the Huns, which is vaguely conceived to be a part of the German country. Sigmund, the father of Sigurd, is a King in the land of the Franks; Sigurd is slain to the south of the Rhine, and in the Rhine is forever hidden the fateful hoard of the Nibelungs. The story in reality wandered out twice into the North from its original home in Germany: once apparently in the Viking age when the Northmen for the first time came into close contact with the other Germanic people on the continent and in the British Islands, a period long antecedent to the "Nibelungenlied;" and again five hundred years later, after the German poem had arisen, since it can be readily shown that this has been used as a source of a part of the material. The very first of these Northern versions is that contained in the "Elder Edda," a collection of mythological and legendary poems in the Old Norse language, of unknown authorship, whose time and place of origin are alike matters of varying supposition. The subject was the theme of poets for centuries in the North. The oldest of the poems in the "Edda" that has to do with the story of the "Nibelungenlied," from internal evidence, was made as early as the year 900; the latest is from a time not far from 1200. These poems and fragments of poems, some of them even in prose rescript and most of them interspersed here and there with bits of prose, do not make in any sense a connected story. Their unknown collector arranged them as well as might be in connected sequence, but even then their action is not consecutive; they overlap each other, parts of the story are told and retold and not seldom with an inconsistency of detail. There is, accordingly, in the "Elder Edda" no thought of an epic either in matter or manner. There is the material for an epic in the rough, but without an idea in the mind of any poet of the time of actual epical treatment.